Gambia: Journalists Complete Training On Human Interest Reporting

Senior and junior reporters from various media institutions in the country Thursday concluded a week-long training on human interest news reporting at The Gambia Press Union (GPU) Secretariat in Fajara.

This training is being conducted under the aegis of the Advocacy for Media project of the Gambia Press Union. The trainer is provided by the Danish-based media NGO, Gambia Media Support (GAMES) that successfully ran the two-year professional reporter programme with the Gambia Press Union from 2010 to 2012.

Speaking at the closing ceremony, Gibairu Janneh, the secretary general of GPU congratulated all the reporters for being nominated by various media institutions to be part of the short training on human interest news reporting. He said the focus of the training was to increase their understanding and the ethical approach towards social studies, which all of them refer to as human interest story.

Janneh noted that the Gambia media most often have a triangular sort of information source in which 99% of the stories are official or formal and journalists either go to workshops, the court or rely on official source of the information, and that very rarely do front pages bear human interest stories.

According to him, such trainings would re-orient the reporters to diversify the sources of information and how best they would handle those pieces of information. He then thanked the trainees for thier cooperation, noting that GPU is here for the common good and is here for the reporters.

For his part, Ahmed Alota, the executive director stated that they would be organising another training that is slated for July and August on basic journalism. Irmelin Viegas, expert from Denmark urged reporters to share the information with their colleagues who were not eligible to be part of the training, and expressed gratitude to the trainees for their effective participation.

Halimatou Ceesay, a reporter at the Point Newspaper delivered the vote of thanks on behalf of her colleagues.

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